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Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Howard Davies.
Cast: Rory Kinnear, Ruth Wilson
Description: New version by Andrew Upton, of Maxim Gorky's darkly comic tale of the personal and professional turmoil found in pre-revolutionary Russia. Directed by Howard Davies.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Phil Davies as the snarling Vassily lords it over his son and daughter
How strange and how elating it is to discover that the angry young adults in the Russian bourgeois family of Maxim Gorky's Philistines resemble their Edwardian and even their 21st-century English equivalents. The war between the generation blazes with timeless ardour.
Philistines, Gorky's first play, which had to wait for a major professional production in Britain until the Royal Shakespeare's in 1986, certainly rates as an apprentice shot in the dark of prerevolutionary Russia.
Its plot sprawls to the point of flabbiness and Andrew Upton in his sometimes crudely over-modernised version has not pruned enough of the characters' vigorously thrusting loquaciousness. Yet even though this embittered, romantic comedy with its faint but distinct undertones of political discontent was premiered just a few years after Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Howard Davies's production reveals how far Gorky paints a different class of picture. Here Russia family discontents and rebellions are viewed from the perspective of the thrusting petit bourgeoisie rather than the impoverished landed gentry.
Bunny Christie's imposing set design conjures up the façade of a three-storey house, which initially swallows up almost the entire stage-space, with faces glimpsed on all floors. This air of sumptuousness turns out to be deceptive. Although the Bessemenov family's living-dining room looks about the size of four large loft spaces - with servants in attendance, Conleth Hill creating waves of delicious comedy as a sardonic, outspoken drunk and a pretty widow lodging upstairs - the place always looks shabbily down-atheel. The bourgeoisie may be the coming thing but they still have a long way to come.
Phil Davis's impressive, snarling paterfamilias, Vassily, a crapulous painting contractor, serves as Philistine's goading catalyst and represents the spirit of rigid, bourgeois Russian conformity. Anti-semitic and convinced the country is going corruptly to the dogs, he lays down the rules of obedience to his law student son Pyotr, his plain, love-lorn daughter Tanya and his train-driver foster son with all the absolutism of a dictator. His betrayal of two of his children's friends to the police for staging a play that might incite "mutiny" - surely a code word for revolutionary socialism - serves to rend the family asunder.
For there runs in parallel to Vassily's attempts to play family power politics a campaign by his offspring to usurp his authority and assert their individuality. It is a pleasure to witness their successful rebellion, motored by liberation desires. Rory Kinnear, in first-rate form as an emotional, aimless Pyotr, succumbs to Justine Mitchell's seductive young widow and memorably executes a complex jump for joy when she accepts him.
Mark Bonnar, as the foster son whom Tanya hopelessly loves, crosses the class barriers and prepares to run away with the serving girl, Susannah Fielding's Polya.
The final image is of the pathetic Tanya, whom Ruth Wilson often renders verbally unintelligible with words and phrases swallowed and slurred. She stands at one of the windows of the big house, looking out, as if she were a prisoner under house arrest. She is the one who has failed to get away. Davis's disintegrating paterfamilias has no one left, apart from her and Stephanie Jacob as his subservient wife Akulina, whom he can tyrannise.
Davies's over-leisurely production does not draw the class lines clearly. It does, though, offer a unique and rousing theatrical impression of Russian youth, on the verge of revolution, struggling to escape the bonds of repressive paternal power.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I enjoyed this atmospheric production and, while the adaptation was a teeny bit hamfisted at times, I liked its contemporary feel and the way it excavated a few belly laughs from the general murkiness. The wide, gloomy set provided an effective backdrop for a household that encapsulated an unstable country on the brink of fragmenting, nicely conveyed via the tensions between the squabbling family and their lodgers. All the performances are good and the 2 hours 50 mins flew by.
- Simon Feegrade, London, England
